Originally posted by Blackwater56

Originally posted by RefMinor

Originally posted by zymurgeist

Oh, a continuation of a useless thread claiming the useless data from a useless application has meaning. How useless. Seriously is there anything left to be said?

 

Yes, what a useless comment.

Hey Ref, did you like GW2? I was looking for your opinion on it. All I saw was something about Salem 

 

I restrict my GW2 comments to its collective of fans "The Hivemind". I don't actually comment on the game because I haven't played it, looks reasonably fun, I don't have a total rejection of cash shops on principle so I may play it in future but I doubt it will be the second coming of Jebus. I am currently doing a couple of small beta's, one of which is Salem. awaiting ArcheAge and WoD and an Alpha of an old friend.

Originally posted by RodimusPrime

wow it's the same three to four haters pounding this horse into sludge. Wouldn't it be easier to take it to PM since tis basically the 4 of you bumping your on thread.  

 

Thank you for your comment, you seem to be getting to be quite a regular here, I guess it's like when you drive past a car crash, you can't help but slow down to have a look. It's a free forum, no one one makes you click, the title tells you what you are clicking on, there's no excuse.

Originally posted by lizardbones

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Originally posted by Blackwater56

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Originally posted by lizardbones


Calculate any actual numbers from XFire without assuming some additional numbers. You can't. There is no way to get from XFire's numbers to an actual subscriber count, actual hours played by the player base or any other actual number. You can't even say that the total number of players dropped by a certain percentage. The closest you can get is "Less" or "More" or "No Change".

It's just a poor quality tool to use the way many people on these forums use it.

 

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Were not looking for actual numbers, were looking for trends

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Look at gervaise1's post. When you say, "We", make sure you know who you're including in the "We".

 

He can include me, he talks sense.

Originally posted by RefMinor

Originally posted by RodimusPrime

wow it's the same three to four haters pounding this horse into sludge. Wouldn't it be easier to take it to PM since tis basically the 4 of you bumping your on thread.  

 

Thank you for your comment, you seem to be getting to be quite a regular here, I guess it's like when you drive past a car crash, you can't help but slow down to have a look. It's a free forum, no one one makes you click, the title tells you what you are clicking on, there's no excuse.

Wow impressed you bumped the thread 3 times in a row. 

This thread is great, nothing like a little schadenfreude.  +1

Originally posted by BigHatLogan

This thread is great, nothing like a little schadenfreude.  +1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3_DjiLLDfo

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by gervaise1

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Originally posted by lizardbones
 



Calculate any actual numbers from XFire without assuming some additional numbers. You can't. There is no way to get from XFire's numbers to an actual subscriber count, actual hours played by the player base or any other actual number. You can't even say that the total number of players dropped by a certain percentage. The closest you can get is "Less" or "More" or "No Change".

It's just a poor quality tool to use the way many people on these forums use it.

 

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100% wrong and you keep ignoring all the posts that show you otherwise lizardbones; dross frankly.
The XFire player numbers being tracked could be used to do what you say without assuming any additional number. You use the official numbers given out by EA e.g. 1M on 23rd December, 1.7M twice, average player hours on different occasions. No assumed numbers necessary.
The hard bit - if you do make any projections - would be deciding how accurate the projection was.
Now you may want the total hours played yesterday to the exact second but observers of this thread just go with the trend but I haven't seen anyone of late try to use the numbers in the way you suggest. (Sorry to pull you up on that point.) 
Next week we may get more data - depends what EA say.
Maybe EA say 450k and it turns out that XFire is a superb tool at this point in time! Maybe they say 600k - so we have a large margin of error but not that bad. Maybe they say 1.7M in which case we all scratch our heads and look to see exactly what EA said! How many trials?

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Then do it. Anyone on these forums, do it. I would like to see it done without assuming any numbers. ** edit starting here ** Calculate a margin of error other than "large". You can't do it and neither can anyone else. There's not enough information there to do it.

 

XFire is the best we got. Almost the only thing we got.

But seeing its earlier history, where it has predicted the trends of competitors, in spite of their own grossly untrue statements, I am pretty confident in it.

But then again, I don't want to know the exact number of subscribers down to single-digits, I only want a trend. Whether the current number is 100.000 more or less, doesn't matter to me, when the game claims a number almost 2 millions.

 

What on earth is happening to WoW.

Originally posted by Metentso

 

What on earth is happening to WoW.

 

 

Looks like the lull before next xpac comes out. Lots of people are playing on the MoP test server, didn't blizz sell something like 1.4 million annual passes? That's a lot of people who have access to beta.

Also, pretty much all the lines are trending downward, everyone's just waiting for some of the new stuff to hit. D3 comes out in 11 days, GW2 is on the horizon, Tera is out there. Lots of options + people have leveled and geared their alts means they're waiting or doing something else until MoP.

Originally posted by Rusque

Originally posted by Metentso

 

 

What on earth is happening to WoW.

 

 

Looks like the lull before next xpac comes out. Lots of people are playing on the MoP test server, didn't blizz sell something like 1.4 million annual passes? That's a lot of people who have access to beta.

Also, pretty much all the lines are trending downward, everyone's just waiting for some of the new stuff to hit. D3 comes out in 11 days, GW2 is on the horizon, Tera is out there. Lots of options + people have leveled and geared their alts means they're waiting or doing something else until MoP.

 

But it lost 1/4 of players in 3 days... something happened 1-2 may.

Originally posted by Metentso

Originally posted by Rusque

Originally posted by Metentso

 

 

What on earth is happening to WoW.

 

 

Looks like the lull before next xpac comes out. Lots of people are playing on the MoP test server, didn't blizz sell something like 1.4 million annual passes? That's a lot of people who have access to beta.

Also, pretty much all the lines are trending downward, everyone's just waiting for some of the new stuff to hit. D3 comes out in 11 days, GW2 is on the horizon, Tera is out there. Lots of options + people have leveled and geared their alts means they're waiting or doing something else until MoP.

 

But it lost 1/4 of players in 3 days... something happened 1-2 may.

The GW2 effect.

Edit:

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/349411

Also i heard that you had to manually add GW2 to xfire for it to register. I dont use xfire myself so i wouldnt know but if true, that s a lot of people that went trough the hassle.

Summer?

We had 30° here :P

Originally posted by obii

Summer?

We had 30° here :P

 

Are you implying that WoW players are the most outdoor-loving persons in all MMO players? :)

Just over 2500 - it will be very interesting to see what EA have to say next week.

 

As for WoW could it be D3 early access? Those that took up the offer will still be WoW subscribers even if they are playing D3.

And financially Blizzard are probably happy to have 12 months @ $7.50 and a D3 sale vs. 6 months (or 2 lots of 3 months) @ $15 less discount and maybe a D3 sale.

To put it in perspective 24M customers playing an average 6 months = a headline 12M subs. 24M customers playing an average 5 months = headline figure of 10M. i.e. customers burning through content quicker. So getting the equivalent of 6 months from people probably makes good business sense. (It will be way more complicated than this but they seem to be seeking to shift the business model away from a pure 'monthly sub' type basis. More like SoE's old access pass.

Originally posted by Minny

Originally posted by Metentso

Originally posted by obii

Summer?

We had 30° here :P

 

Are you implying that WoW players are the most outdoor-loving persons in all MMO players? :)

Xfire had a huge patch on May 2 2012 om 19:29:46

All games always loose 10% to 20% a few days after such a patch.

The mmorpg's don't recuperate the numbers as fewer and fewer MMO players prefer to install the patch and give admin rights to Xfire.

The last patch happened on Feb 29th and had a similar trend.

The decline of Xfire has been going on for years now.

So after a patch some players stop using xFire forever?

Originally posted by gervaise1

Just over 2500 - it will be very interesting to see what EA have to say next week.

 

As for WoW could it be D3 early access? Those that took up the offer will still be WoW subscribers even if they are playing D3.

And financially Blizzard are probably happy to have 12 months @ $7.50 and a D3 sale vs. 6 months (or 2 lots of 3 months) @ $15 less discount and maybe a D3 sale.

To put it in perspective 24M customers playing an average 6 months = a headline 12M subs. 24M customers playing an average 5 months = headline figure of 10M. i.e. customers burning through content quicker. So getting the equivalent of 6 months from people probably makes good business sense. (It will be way more complicated than this but they seem to be seeking to shift the business model away from a pure 'monthly sub' type basis. More like SoE's old access pass.

I know exactly what they're going to say.

 

"Most of the 1.7 million as mentioned is still with us and were in a good position to grow after patch 1.2"

Originally posted by Blackwater56

Originally posted by gervaise1

Just over 2500 - it will be very interesting to see what EA have to say next week.

 

As for WoW could it be D3 early access? Those that took up the offer will still be WoW subscribers even if they are playing D3.

And financially Blizzard are probably happy to have 12 months @ $7.50 and a D3 sale vs. 6 months (or 2 lots of 3 months) @ $15 less discount and maybe a D3 sale.

To put it in perspective 24M customers playing an average 6 months = a headline 12M subs. 24M customers playing an average 5 months = headline figure of 10M. i.e. customers burning through content quicker. So getting the equivalent of 6 months from people probably makes good business sense. (It will be way more complicated than this but they seem to be seeking to shift the business model away from a pure 'monthly sub' type basis. More like SoE's old access pass.

I know exactly what they're going to say.

 

"Most of the 1.7 million as mentioned is still with us and were in a good position to grow after patch 1.2"

 

Thngs:

 

1.  Subs aren't players.   A sub with one days' worth of time counts, even if the person hasn't played the game for weeks and has uninstalled the client.

 

2.  They sold close to 2.2 million copies by March 31st.  Of which, on March 31st, at least 110K were still in the trial.  And I'm figuring another 150Kish were still time-card activated and could not expire, even if not being played, until sometime in April.

 

3.  They can't lie to the subs.  But they don't have to tell you active accounts (accounts where people are logging on at least once-a-week) and can mislead you to the active player base (which in sub-based MMOs is always lower barring compenstory time, free-trials, etc.).

Originally posted by Jakard

We really just have no way of knowing how many subscribers the game has. We can take Bioware at their word when they say they haven't lost any subscribers or we can make our assumptions that they're lying. To be honest, I think Bioware has integrity. But at the same time, I play the game.... and on my server which is low population.... no planet ever reaches 20 on the Republic side. It's possible everyone migrated to other servers. I'm just not sure.

From what has been explained, the maybe telling the truth which can be very decieving. When the last gave the statment of 1.7 or haven't changed they are speaking about subs. There maybe significantly less players as was eluded to in one of the most recent interviews stating that play time has decreased by a lot. So players still under contract that have no intention of renewing.

TERA also launched... not a huge MMO, but at least on based on the area chat - there are people that left TOR. 

 

One of the big components we don't know in all of this is the actual number of ACTIVE Xfire users.  It leaves some doubt about the value of the raw numbers... more doubt, if we saw TOR actually rising in the overall rankings, while losing raw players.

On the other hand - since we see TOR now dropping below World of Tanks AND losing raw numbers... that's probably another pretty good sign (along with all the other data) that TOR is continuing to slide.

What is XFire? I've never heard of it.